Incorporating microblogging (“tweeting”) in higher education: Lessons learnt in a knowledge management course

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper features a competency-enhancing social networking application which provides a solution for the dilemma of non-participating (non-engaged) students in class: 'pedagogical tweeting'. Twitter's micro-blogging service enables both instructors and students to send and read messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters, incl. links to blogs, web pages, photos, videos, etc. As Twitter can be accessed from a website, via applications on PC/Mac, iPhone, Android phones, etc., it represents an effective tool to engage students, e.g. by taking up questions during in-class and out-of-class discussions or by providing advice on assignments etc. Students in turn can generate their own learning context and benefit from collaborative knowledge creation. We share respective tweeting experiences made during a course on Knowledge Management (KM) taught at Singapore Management University (SMU) backed up by exploratory research on students' micro-blogging activities. We discuss challenges ahead and propose four hypotheses about the effective deployment of social awareness streams such as Twitter in higher education.

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in STEM Domains: Towards a Meta-synthesis

“…Descriptive results indicate, from instructors' perspectives, communicating with these tools seemed especially beneficial to increase participation among students who might have otherwise been absent and/or shy or quiet during face-to-face class time [21,29]. Among researchers examining synchronous collaboration among primary mathematics students, results indicated that students thoughtfully and successfully engaged in problem solving while participating in a virtual environment [4] and online peer tutoring that improved tutored students' mathematical reasoning skills in addition to personal views about mathematics learning [36].…”

“…Although, the majority of students enrolled in the higher-education blended-learning engineering course reported the SL platform 'better' for motivation, they also reported it 'worse' for concentration [29]. Additionally, although higher-education computer-science students overwhelmingly tweeted constructive comments that encouraged class discussion, there were also examples of students tweeting unrelated comments [21]. Other potential drawbacks to "Mixed Synchronous" CSCL included the additional time communicating via chat took as compared to face-toface interactions [30] and the finding that mixedgender pairing may negatively affect secondary education female achievement in physics problem solving [10].…”

“…The use of these tools while engaged in synchronous CSCL driven by social constructivist pedagogies encouraged effective active participation whether that be through chat [10,29,30,37], tweeting [21], shared word processing and audio connection [8], adapted collaborative learning support (ACLS) [37], a semi-computerized inference tutoring tool [8], scripts [4] or a "game like" peer tutoring system [36].…”

“…Of the papers sampled in this cluster, there did not appear to be differences across K12 and higher education. These papers used a variety of pedagogies guided by social constructivist principles such as inquiry-based instruction [30], case based instruction [8], scaffolding [10,21,29,36,37], and computer simulation [4].…”

“…Additionally, students enrolled in a blended higher-education engineering course viewed chat as one of the best tools in the Second Life (SL) platform to support learning [29]. Eight-five percent of students surveyed from two higher-education computer science courses that integrated tweeting to increase class discussion found the use of tweeting in their class stimulated their desire to learn more about the course content and 93% of surveyed students believed their university should offer more courses with tweeting activities [21]. Aside from active participation and positive perceptions of these CSCL tools, the results from these sampled papers found other ways "Mixed Synchronous" CSCL to be effective for learners.…”